Summer’s here and the time is right … for eating lots of gazpacho, among other things. Mid-June the temperature shot up overnight and we woke up sweating under a laughably-named ’summer duvet’. Out came the fans, off came the bedclothes - and all other clothes, too.
Oven-hot is the only way to describe the weather when […]

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Well, I was wrong on two counts. Firstly I thought the Germans would equalise (because they always do against England) and secondly I did not think there would be an even bigger party than after the semi-final win - but there was!
After three weeks, six undefeated matches - and scoring twelve goals and only conceding […]

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Spain’s annihilation of Russia (sorry Ivan) has sent the centre of Torrevieja into a total frenzy. Hours after the match ended 3-0 to Spain an impromptu cavalcade of neverending cars are still cruising down the main roads with horns blaring, flags waving, klaxons sounding. Guys sitting on the roofs of moving 4×4s banging drums - […]

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“The opera is a bit like sex: you never know how long it will last and you’ll feel a fool if you clap in the middle.” I don’t recall who coined these words. It was probably Mark Twain; he had a way with a scurrilous comment and is attributed for all sorts of funnies, but […]

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Living in the hills of Tenerife, the sights, sounds and smells seem amplified to epic proportions. Whether it’s the pungent smell of a dozen goats’ bottoms, the distant howling of my psycho neighbour or the slap-in-the-face, poke-in-the-eye, boot-in-the-balls astonishment at the night sky. I LOVE LIVING HERE.
I used to live down there (he says pointing […]

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Firecrackers and car horns sounded late into the early morning following Spain’s narrow win over Italy - putting them through to the Euro 2008 football semi-finals. Amongst the crowd were Spain’s King and Queen who kept herself cool with a fan (the paper sort not the football sort). It was a tense match culminating in […]

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My daughter has chosen Spanish markets as a theme for her ‘A’ level photography project in the UK. This meant she had talk to her tutor and ask permission to fly out to Spain to fulfil the brief she had set herself - clever girl! The tutor agreed and Victoria later took a taxi to […]

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I heard somewhere that there was a shortage of sparrows in the UK. Let me try to explain this phenomenon because I think they are all in Spain. In fact I can be much more geographically precise than that – they are all in my fig tree.
It only takes a few minutes’ research to learn […]

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You may struggle to get your tongue round the word at first, but don’t worry, you’ll be going there a lot so you’ll soon get the hang of it. El Ayuntamiento: The Town Hall. Sounds so grand in English but what comes as a surprise is how just about every tiny pueblo has its very […]

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Well, he of the red pen, returned our sitcom efforts with a commendable amount of red scrawl and the potential was deemed as neither ‘yay nor nay’ but a solid ‘maybe’. Which is better than a slap in the face with a wet carp, but not quite as good as a letter from the Director […]

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